Cleveland Clinic aids effort toward online medical education

VentureBeat.com reports that a San Francisco startup called Doximity — commonly referred to as “Facebook for doctors” — is moving instead toward medical education, with the help of the Cleveland Clinic.
The Clinic “has agreed to offer credit to practicing physicians who use Doximity to learn on the job,” the website reports. “The goal is to move continuing medical education, known as CME, to an online space so that it's not confined to auditoriums and conference halls.”
CME “refers to the practice of physicians learning about new areas of the field, and staying on top of the latest research,” VentureBeat.com notes. In the past, doctors “have needed to travel to a remote auditorium” to do this. Now they can access research on a smart phone.
“Doctors spend about 40 hours a year to get accredited and 90 percent of physician education happens offline,” said Doximity CEO Jeff Tangney during the VentureBeat HealthBeat conference on Monday. “This is time spent away from practice, not to mention administrative time needed to track the courses they've completed. It's a pain. This platform will make it easier for doctors to track all these credits and automatically keep them up-to-date.”
In a news release about the arrangement, Dr. William Carey, director of the Clinic's Center for Continuing Education, said, “The escalating depth, pace and hyper-specialization of medicine demand that physician education adapt to an increasingly mobile, tech-savvy and team-based health care work force.
"This new approach to CME extends the social elements central to medical school and residency training —collaborative group learning and cross-disciplinary discussion — to the practicing physician learner," he concluded.

Growth in Mexico

Giant Cleveland law firm Jones Day said it has added two new partners to its Mexico City office, “marking the fifth new hire for the office this year and bringing the total number of lawyers there to 37,” Bloomberg reports.
Alejandro Chico will join the firm's Banking & Finance practice, moving from Bufete Robles Miaja, where he was a partner in that firm's capital markets practice. Antonio Gonzalez will work in Jones Day's Global Disputes practice, arriving from Lopez Melih, Gonzalez, Facha & Estrada, where he was a founding and administrative partner.
“Alejandro's appointment is part of our strategy to add depth to our capital markets and banking & finance practices in Mexico, and more broadly in Latin America,” Fernando de Ovando, partner-in-charge of Jones Day's Mexico City office, said in the statement. “His arrival, along with the addition of Antonio and his vast experience in high-profile disputes throughout Mexico, strengthen our full service capabilities in Mexico City.”

Enjoy your stay

Remember that controversy about whether two board members at the School Employees Retirement System of Ohio should be able to attend a big conference in Hawaii?
The board members (grudgingly) relented and aren't making the trip. It turns out many others are making the same choice.
“Organizers of an annual conference for people who manage more than $3 trillion in public sector pension funds in the U.S. and Canada say a significant number of administrators are skipping this year's meeting in Hawaii to avoid the perception they're wasting money by heading to the island paradise,” according to the Associated Press.
Roughly 650 people are coming to this year's weeklong National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, compared with about 1,000 attendees at last year's meeting in New York, says executive director Hank Kim. He tells the AP that trustees and others from around the country are thinking about "headline risk" — how the trip may be perceived back home.
Indeed, Beverly Woolridge, chairwoman of the Ohio school pension system's board of trustees, said in a statement last month that the travel issue had become a "major distraction."

Time to start saving

When it comes to retirement, Generation Xers are in a tough spot.
This group of workers in their late 30s to 40s “saw their net worth drop by a larger proportion than older Americans during the financial crisis and came out of it less prepared for retirement than the post-World War II boomer generation,” MarketWatch.com reports.
The website notes that members of Generation X — people born from 1966 to 1975 who are now 38 to 47 years old — suffered losses amounting to 45% of median net worth between 2007 and 2010, a significantly higher percentage than those born in the 20 years immediately after the war, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts' economic mobility project.
“Based on income and other projections, typical Gen Xers are on track to replace half of their pre-retirement income if they stop working at 65, the study finds,” MarketWatch.com says. “Boomers born between 1946 and 1955 look set to replace 82% of income. Later boomers, born between 1956 and 1965, are on track to replace 59%.”
Gen Xers are “facing a genuine possibility of downward mobility, if they don't change course,” says Erin Currier, who heads the mobility project for Pew.
Next step: saving more and borrowing less.
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